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During The Last 17 Years... I Have Been Working At The Restoration Of A Once Exhausted Hillside. Its Scars Are Now Healed Over, Though Still Visible, And This Year It Has Provided Abundant Pasture, More Than In Any Year Since We Have Owned It. But To Make It As Good As It Is Now Has Taken 17 Years. If I Had Been A Millionaire Or If My Family Had Been Starving, It Would Still Have Taken 17 Years. It Can Be Better Than It Is Now, But That Will Take Longer. For It To Live Fully In Its Own Responsibility, As It Did Before Bad Use Ran It Down, May Take Hundreds Of Years.

-Wendell Berry

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During The Last 17

Wendell Berry

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During The Last 17 Years... I Have Been Working At The Restoration Of A Once Exhausted Hillside. Its Scars Are Now Healed Over, Though Still Visible, And This Year It Has Provided Abundant Pasture, More Than In Any Year Since We Have Owned It. But To Make It As Good As It Is Now Has Taken 17 Years. If I Had Been A Millionaire Or If My Family Had Been Starving, It Would Still Have Taken 17 Years. It Can Be Better Than It Is Now, But That Will Take Longer. For It To Live Fully In Its Own Responsibility, As It Did Before Bad Use Ran It Down, May Take Hundreds Of Years.

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There Are Endless Ways To Amuse Oneself And Be Idle, And Most Of Them Lie Outside The Woods. I Assume That When A Man Goes To The Woods He Goes Because He Needs To. I Think He Is Drawn To The Wilderness Much As He Is Drawn To A Woman: It Is, In Its Way, His Opposite. It Is As Far As Possible Unlike His Home Or His Work Or Anything He Will Ever Manufacture. For That Reason He Can Take From It A Solace-an Understanding Of Himself, Of What He Needs And What He Can Do Without-such As He Can Find Nowhere Else.

I Don't Believe That Grief Passes Away. It Has Its Time And Place Forever. More Time Is Added To It; It Becomes A Story Within A Story. But Grief And Griever Alike Endure.

In The Dark Of The Moon, In Flying Snow, In The Dead Of Winter, War Spreading, Families Dying, The World In Danger, I Walk The Rocky Hillside, Sowing Clover.

A Person Who Undertakes To Grow A Garden At Home, By Practices That Will Preserve Rather Than Exploit The Economy Of The Soil, Has His Mind Precisely Against What Is Wrong With Us... What I Am Saying Is That If We Apply Our Minds Directly And Competently To The Needs Of The Earth, Then We Will Have Begun To Make Fundamental And Necessary Changes In Our Minds. We Will Begin To Understand And To Mistrust And To Change Our Wasteful Economy, Which Markets Not Just The Produce Of Earth, But Also The Earth's Ability To Produce.

To Be Sane In A Mad Time Is Bad For The Brain, Worse For The Heart.

We Know Enough Of Our Own History By Now To Be Aware That People Exploit What They Have Merely Concluded To Be Of Value, But They Defend What They Love. To Defend What We Love We Need A Particularizing Language, For We Love What We Particularly Know.

I Go Among Trees And Sit Still. All My Stirring Becomes Quiet Around Me Like Circles On Water. My Tasks Lie In Their Places Where I Left Them, Asleep Like Cattle... Then What I Am Afraid Of Comes. I Live For A While In Its Sight. What I Fear In It Leaves It, And The Fear Of It Leaves Me. It Sings, And I Hear Its Song.

This New War, Like The Previous One, Would Be A Test Of The Power Of Machines Against People And Places; Whatever Its Causes And Justifications, It Would Make The World Worse. This Was True Of That New War, And It Has Been True Of Every New War Since... I Knew Too That This New War Was Not Even New But Was Only The Old One Come Again. And What Caused It? It Was Caused, I Thought, By People Failing To Love One Another, Failing To Love Their Enemies.

Unexpected Wonders Happen, Not On Schedule, Or When You Expect Or Want Them To Happen, But If You Keep Hanging Around, They Do Happen.

When Despair For The World Grows In Me... I Come Into The Presence Of Still Water. And I Feel Above Me The Day-blind Stars Waiting With Their Light. For A Time I Rest In The Grace Of The World, And Am Free.

As Long As We Insist On Relating To It Strictly On Our Own Terms-as Strange To Us Or Subject To Us-the Wilderness Is Alien, Threatening, Fearful. We Have No Choice Then But To Become Its Exploiters, And To Lose, By Consequence, Our Place In It. It Is Only When, By Humility, Openness, Generosity, Courage, We Make Ourselves Able To Relate To It On Its Terms That It Ceases To Be Alien.

At Home The Great Delight Is To See The Clover And Grass Now Growing On Places That Were Bare When We Came. These Small Healings Of The Ground Are My Model Accomplishment-everything Else I Do Must Aspire To That. While I Was At That Work The World Gained With Every Move I Made, And I Harmed Nothing.

I Could Die In Peace, I Think, If The World Was Beautiful. To Know It's Being Ruined Is Hard.

We're Living, It Seems, In The Culmination Of A Long Warfare - Warfare Against Human Beings, Other Creatures And The Earth Itself.

In This State Of Total Consumerism-which Is To Say A State Of Helpless Dependence On Things And Services And Ideas And Motives That We Have Forgotten How To Provide Ourselves-all Meaningful Contact Between Ourselves And The Earth Is Broken. We Do Not Understand The Earth In Terms Either Of What It Offers Us Or Of What It Requires Of Us, And I Think It Is The Rule That People Inevitably Destroy What They Do Not Understand.

The Ecological Principle In Agriculture Is To Connect The Genius Of The Place, To Fit The Farming To The Farm.

Beauty . . . Cannot Be Interpreted. It Is Not An Empirically Verifiable Fact; It Is Not A Quantity.

One Of The Most Important Resources That A Garden Makes Available For Use, Is The Gardener's Own Body. A Garden Gives The Body The Dignity Of Working In Its Own Support. It Is A Way Of Rejoining The Human Race.

I Like The Way That The History Of The Tree Shapes The Tree. There's No Distinction Between The Tree And Its History. You Can Lose Yourself In That Thought.

A Community Is The Mental And Spiritual Condition Of Knowing That The Place Is Shared, And That The People Who Share The Place Define And Limit The Possibilities Of Each Other's Lives. It Is The Knowledge That People Have Of Each Other, Their Concern For Each Other, Their Trust In Each Other, The Freedom With Which They Come And Go Among Themselves.

This Massive Ascendancy Of Corporate Power Over Democratic Process Is Probably The Most Ominous Development Since The End Of World War Ii, And For The Most Part "the Free World" Seems To Be Regarding It As Merely Normal.

How Do We Submit? By Not Being Radical Enough. Or By Not Being Thorough Enough, Which Is The Same Thing.

All We Can Do To Prepare Rightly For Tomorrow Is To Do The Right Thing Today.

In Losing Stewardship We Lose Fellowship; We Become Outcasts From The Great Neighborhood Of Creation.

The Wrecking Ball Is Characteristic Of Our Way With Materials. We 'cannot Afford' To Log A Forest Selectively, To Mine Without Destroying Topography, Or To Farm Without Catastrophic Soil Erosion. A Production-oriented Economy Can Indeed Live In This Way, But Only So Long As Production Lasts.

When You Are New At Sheep-raising And Your Ewe Has A Lamb, Your Impulse Is To Stay There And Help It Nurse And See To It And All. After A While You Know That The Best Thing You Can Do Is Walk Out Of The Barn.

We Must See That It Is Foolish, Sinful And Suicidal To Destroy The Health Of Nature For The Sake Of An Economy That Is Really Not An Economy At All But Merely A Financial System, One That Is Unnatural, Undemocratic, Sacrilegious, And Ephemeral.

So, Friends, Every Day Do Something That Won't Compute. Love The Lord. Love The World. Work For Nothing. Take All That You Have And Be Poor. Love Someone Who Does Not Deserve It. Denounce The Government And Embrace The Flag. Hope To Live In That Free Republic For Which It Stands.

Education In The True Sense, Of Course, Is An Enablement To Serve-both The Living Human Community In Its Natural Household Or Neighborhood And The Precious Cultural Possessions That The Living Community Inherits Or Should Inherit.

The Law Is Meant To Work For Justice. But People Who Know Themselves Know That, At Some Point, Justice Had Better Be Mitigated By Mercy. And You Don't Get To Mercy By A Legal Principle. You Get To Mercy By Way Of Imagination, Sympathy, Tenderness Of Heart - Which Are Not Weaknesses.

To Me, An Economy That Sees The Life Of A Community Or A Place As Expendable, And Reckons Its Value Only In Terms Of Money, Is Not Acceptable Because It Is Not Realistic. I Am Thinking As I Believe We Must Think If We Wish To Discuss The Best Uses Of People, Places, And Things, And If We Wish To Give Affection Some Standing In Our Thoughts.

Whether We And Our Politicians Know It Or Not, Nature Is Party To All Our Deals And Decisions, And She Has More Votes, A Longer Memory, And A Sterner Sense Of Justice Than We Do.

The Earth Is What We All Have In Common.

Why Should Conservationists Have A Positive Interest In... Farming? There Are Lots Of Reasons, But The Plainest Is: Conservationists Eat.

We Enter Solitude, In Which Also We Lose Loneliness. True Solitude Is Found In The Wild Places, Where One Is Without Human Obligation. One’s Inner Voices Become Audible. One Feels The Attraction Of One’s Most Intimate Sources. In Consequence, One Responds More Clearly To Other Lives. The More Coherent One Becomes Within Oneself As A Creature, The More Fully One Enters Into The Communion Of All Creatures.

O Thou, Far Off And Here, Whole And Broken, Who In Necessity And In Bounty Wait, Whose Truth Is Light And Dark, Mute Though Spoken, By Thy Wide Grace Show Me Thy Narrow Gate.

Eating Is An Agricultural Act.

It Is A Horrible Fact That We Can Read In The Daily Paper, Without Interrupting Our Breakfast, Numerical Reckonings Of Death And Destruction That Ought To Break Our Hearts Or Scare Us Out Of Our Wits.

Only The Action That Is Moved By Love For The Good At Hand Has The Hope Of Being Responsible And Generous.

There Is Change By Necessity Or Adaptation, And There Is Contrived Change Or Novelty.

Soil Is Not Usually Lost In Slabs Or Heaps Of Magnificent Tonnage. It Is Lost A Little At A Time Over Millions Of Acres By The Careless Acts Of Millions Of People. It Cannot Be Saved By Heroic Feats Of Gigantic Technology, But Only By Millions Of Small Acts And Restraints, Conditioned By Small Fidelities, Skills, And Desires. Soil Loss Is Ultimately A Cultural Problem; It Will Be Corrected Only By Cultural Solutions.

We Can Say Without Exaggeration That The Present National Ambition Of The United States Is Unemployment. People Live For Quitting Time, For Weekends, For Vacations, And For Retirement; Moreover, This Ambition Seems To Be Classless, As True In The Executive Suites As On The Assembly Lines. One Works Not Because The Work Is Necessary, Valuable, Useful To A Desirable End, Or Because One Loves To Do It, But Only To Be Able To Quit - A Condition That A Saner Time Would Regard As Infernal, A Condemnation.

I Come Into The Peace Of Wild Things Who Do Not Tax Their Lives With Forethought Of Grief.... For A Time I Rest In The Grace Of The World, And Am Free.

There Are No Unsacred Places; There Are Only Sacred Places And Desecrated Places.

Gathering Places

There Comes . . . A Longing Never To Travel Again Except On Foot.

A Change Of Heart Or Of Values Without A Practice Is Only Another Pointless Luxury Of A Passively Consumptive Way Of Life.

The Reason To Preserve Wilderness Is That We Need It. We Need Wilderness Of All Kinds, Large And Small, Public And Private. Wee Need To Go Now And Again Into Places Where Our Work Is Disallowed, Where Our Hopes And Plans Have No Standing. We Need To Come Into The Presence Of The Unqualified And Mysterious Formality Of Creation.

Physical Health Doesn't Exist Apart From The Health Of Other Things. Health Ultimately Involves The Community, And The Community Ultimately Involves The Place And Natural Life Of That Place, So That Real Health Is Harmony With The World.

Eating Is An Agricultural Act. Eating Ends The Annual Drama Of The Food Economy That Begins With Planting And Birth. Most Eaters, However, Are No Longer Aware That This Is True. They Think Of Food As An Agricultural Product, Perhaps, But They Do Not Think Of Themselves As Participants In Agriculture. They Think Of Themselves As 'consumers.'

When Humans Act Like Animals, They Become The Most Dangerous Of Animals To Themselves And Other Humans, And This Is Because Of Another Critical Difference Between Humans And Animals: Whereas Animals Are Usually Restrained By The Limits Of Physical Appetites, Humans Have Mental Appetites That Can Be Far More Gross And Capacious Than Physical Ones. Only Humans Squander And Hoard, Murder And Pillage Because Of Notions.

A Corporation, Essentially, Is A Pile Of Money To Which A Number Of Persons Have Sold Their Moral Allegiance.

We Are Living In The Most Destructive And, Hence, The Most Stupid Period Of The History Of Our Species.

When You Are Old You Can Look Back And See Yourself When You Are Young. It Is Almost Like Looking Down From Heaven. And You See Yourself As A Young Woman, Just A Big Girl Really, Half Awake To The World. You See Yourself Happy, Holding In Your Arms A Good, Decent, Gentle, Beloved Young Man With The Blood Keen In His Veins, Who Before Long Is Going To Disappear, Just Disappear, Into A Storm Of Hate And Flying Metal And Fire. And You Just Don't Know It.

You Mustn’t Wish For Another Life. You Mustn’t Want To Be Somebody Else. What You Must Do Is This: “rejoice Evermore. Pray Without Ceasing. In Everything Give Thanks.” I Am Not All The Way Capable Of So Much, But Those Are The Right Instructions.

How Joyful To Be Together, Alone As When We First Were Joined In Our Little House By The River Long Ago, Except That Now We Know Each Other, As We Did Not Then; And Now Instead Of Two Stories Fumbling To Meet, We Belong To One Story That The Two, Joining, Made. And Now We Touch Each Other With The Tenderness Of Mortals, Who Know Themselves

And I Knew That The Spirit That Had Gone Forth To Shape The World And Make It Live Was Still Alive In It. I Just Had No Doubt. I Could See That I Lived In The Created World, And It Was Still Being Created. I Would Be Part Of It Forever. There Was No Escape. The Spirit That Made It Was In It, Shaping It And Reshaping It, Sometimes Lying At Rest, Sometimes Standing Up And Shaking Itself, Like A Muddy Horse, And Letting The Pieces Fly.

Our Model Citizen Is A Sophisticate Who, Before Puberty, Understands How To Produce A Baby, But Who At The Age Of Thirty Will Not Know How To Produce A Potato

What Can't Be Helped Must Be Endured.

If We Do Not Serve What Coheres And Endures, We Serve What Disintegrates And Destroys.

If You Can Read And Have More Imagination Than A Doorknob, What Need Do You Have For A 'movie Version' Of A Novel?

If I Was Freer Than I Had Ever Been In My Life, I Was Not Yet Entirely Free, For I Still Hung On To An Idea That Had Been Set Deep In Me By All My Schooling So Far: I Was A Bright Boy And I Ought To Make Something Out Of Myself... Something Else That Would Be A Cut Or Two Above My Humble Origins.

There's A World Of Difference . . . Between That Information To Which We Now Presumably Have Access By Way Of Computers, Libraries, And The Rest Of It, Great Stockpiles Of Data, And The Knowledge That People Have In Their Bones By Which They Do Good Work And Live Good Lives.

The Difference Between A Path And A Road Is Not Only The Obvious One. A Path Is Little More Than A Habit That Comes With Knowledge Of A Place. It Is A Sort Of Ritual Of Familiarity. As A Form, It Is A Form Of Contact With A Known Landscape. It Is Not Destructive. It Is The Perfect Adaptation, Through Experience And Familiarity, Of Movement To Place; It Obeys The Natural Contours; Such Obstacles As It Meets It Goes Around.

In Health The Flesh Is Graced, The Holy Enters The World.

So, Friends, Every Day Do Something That Won't Compute...give Your Approval To All You Cannot Understand...ask The Questions That Have No Answers. Put Your Faith In Two Inches Of Humus That Will Build Under The Trees Every Thousand Years...laugh. Be Joyful Though You Have Considered All The Facts....practice Resurrection.

Individualism Is Going Around These Days In Uniform, Handing Out The Party Line On Individualism.

We Clasp The Hands Of Those Who Go Before Us.

There Are, It Seems, Two Muses: The Muse Of Inspiration, Who Gives Us Inarticulate Visions And Desires, And The Muse Of Realization, Who Returns Again And Again To Say, 'it Is Yet More Difficult Than You Thought.' It May Be That When We No Longer Know What To Do, We Have Come To Our Real Work And When We No Longer Know Which Way To Go, We Have Begun Our Real Journey.

The Only True And Effective "operator's Manual For Spaceship Earth" Is Not A Book That Any Human Will Ever Write; It Is Hundreds Of Thousands Of Local Cultures.

I Prayed Like A Man Walking In A Forest At Night, Feeling His Way With His Hands, At Each Step Fearing To Fall Into Pure Bottomlessness Forever. Prayer Is Like Lying Awake At Night, Afraid, With Your Head Under The Cover, Hearing Only The Beating Of Your Own Heart.

It Is Understood That Nonhuman Creatures Adapt To Their Places Or They Don't Live. And For Some Reason That I Can't Figure Out, Even The Biologists Have Excused Our Own Species From That Obligation. I Think There's Going To Be A Biological Penalty To Be Paid For That Eventually.

The Music, While It Lasted, Brought A New World Into Being.

When Despair For The World Grows In Me And I Wake In The Night At The Least Sound In Fear Of What My Life And My Children's Lives May Be, I Go And Lie Down Where The Wood Drake Rests In His Beauty On The Water, And The Great Heron Feeds. I Come Into The Peace Of Wild Things Who Do Not Tax Their Lives With Forethought Of Grief. I Come Into The Presence Of Still Water. And I Feel Above Me The Day-blind Stars Waiting With Their Light. For A Time I Rest In The Grace Of The World, And Am Free.

I Am Speaking Of The Life Of A Man Who Knows That The World Is Not Given By His Fathers, But Borrowed From His Children; Who Has Undertaken To Cherish It And Do It No Damage, Not Because He Is Duty-bound, But Because He Loves The World And Loves His Children...

To Mind Being Disliked By A Woman You Don’t Desire And Are Not Married To Is Yet Another Serious Failure Of Common Sense.

I Believe That The World Was Created And Approved By Love, That It Subsists, Coheres, And Endures By Love, And That, Insofar As It Is Redeemable, It Can Be Redeemed Only By Love.

Much Of Our Waste Problem Is To Be Accounted For By The Intentional Flimsiness And Unrepairability Of The Labor-savers And Gadgets That We Have Become Addicted To.

Under The Rule Of The "free Market" Ideology, We Have Gone Through Two Decades Of An Energy Crisis Without An Effective Energy Policy. Because Of An Easy And Thoughtless Reliance On Imported Oil, We Have No Adequate Policy For The Conservation Of Gasoline And Other Petroleum Products. We Have No Adequate Policy For The Development Or Use Of Other, Less Harmful Forms Of Energy. We Have No Adequate System Of Public Transportation.

It Is Impossible To Prefigure The Salvation Of The World In The Same Language By Which The World Has Been Dismembered And Defaced.

We Cannot Comprehend What Comprehends Us.

It Would Take Me Years Of Reading, Thought, And Experience To Learn Again That In This World Limits Are Not Only Inescapable But Indispensable.

The Wild Rose” – By Wendell Berry Sometimes, Hidden From Me In Daily Custom And In Ritual I Live By You Unaware, As If By The Beating Of My Heart. Suddenly You Flare Again In My Sight A Wild Rose At The Edge Of The Thicket Where Yesterday There Was Only Shade And I Am Blessed And Choose Again, That Which I Chose Before.

I Thought, He Must Forebear To Reveal His Power And Glory By Presenting Himself As Himself, And Must Be Present Only In The Ordinary Miracle Of The Existence Of His Creatures. Those Who Wish To See Him Must See Him In The Poor, The Hungry, The Hurt, The Wordless Creatures, The Groaning And Travailing Beautiful World.

Protest That Endures, I Think, Is Moved By A Hope Far More Modest Than That Of Public Success: Namely, The Hope Of Preserving Qualities In One's Own Heart And Spirit That Would Be Destroyed By Acquiescence.

It Is A Fact That The Entire Kentucky River System, Which The Central Part Of The State Complacently Depends Upon For Its Future Water, Is Deteriorating Rapidly Because Of Strip Mining, Because Of Bad Farming, Because Of Industrial And Agricultural Pollutants, Because Of Urban Sewage. It Is Deteriorating, That Is To Say, Because Almost Nobody Cares, Or Cares To Know, Where Water Comes From, So Long As It Keeps Coming.

Living Without Expectations Is Hard But, When You Can Do It, Good. Living Without Hope Is Harder, And That Is Bad. You Have Got To Have Hope, And You Must'nt Shirk It. Love, After All, Hopeth All Things. But Maybe You Must Learn, And It Is Hard Learning, Not To Hope Out Loud, Especially For Other People. You Must Not Let Your Hope Turn Into Expectation.

For The True Measure Of Agriculture Is Not The Sophistication Of Its Equipment The Size Of Its Income Or Even The Statistics Of Its Productivity But The Good Health Of The Land.

I Would Like You To Show Me, If You Can, Where The Line Can Be Drawn Between An Organism And It's Environment. The Environment Is In You. It's Passing Through You. You're Breathing It In And Out. You And Every Other Creature.

Despite Its Protests To The Contrary, Modern Christianity Has Become Willy-nilly The Religion Of The State And The Economic Status Quo. Because It Has Been So Exclusively Dedicated To Incanting Anemic Souls Into Heaven, It Has Been Made The Tool Of Much Earthly Villainy. It Has, For The Most Part, Stood Silently By While A Predatory Economy Has Ravaged The World, Destroyed Its Natural Beauty And Health, Divided And Plundered Its Human Communities And Households.

When You Take Away The Subsistence Economy, Then Your Farm Population Is Seriously Exposed To The Vagaries Of The Larger Economy. As It Used To Be, The Subsistence Economy Carried People Through The Hard Times, And What You Might Call The Housewife's Economy Of Cream And Eggs Often Held These Farms And Their Families Together.

It Is No More Possible To Live In The Future Than It Is To Live In The Past. If Life Is Not Now, It Is Never.

The More Artificial A Human Environment Becomes, The More The Word ‘natural’ Becomes A Term Of Value.

Far From Making Peace, Wars Invariably Serve As Classrooms And Laboratories Where Men And Techniques And States Of Mind Are Prepared For The Next War.

The Only Sustainable City - And This, To Me, Is The Indispensable Ideal And Goal - Is A City In Balance With Its Countryside.

The Care Of The Earth Is Our Most Ancient And Most Worthy, And After All Our Most Pleasing Responsibility. To Cherish What Remains Of It And To Foster Its Renewal Is Our Only Hope.

Community, Then, Is An Indispensable Term In Any Discussion Of The Connection Between People And Land. A Healthy Community Is A Form That Includes All The Local Things That Are Connected By The Larger, Ultimately Mysterious Form Of The Creation. In Speaking Of Community, Then, We Are Speaking Of A Complex Connection Not Only Among Human Beings Or Between Humans And Their Homeland But Also Between Human Economy And Nature, Between Forest Or Prairie And Field Or Orchard, And Between Troublesome Creatures And Pleasant Ones. All Neighbors Are Included.

It's Impossible To Contemplate The Life Of Soil Very Long Without Seeing Its Analogy To The Life Of The Spirit.

They Will Grow, Deliver, And Cook Your Food For You And (just Like Your Mother) Beg You To Eat It. That They Do Not Yet Offer To Insert It, Pre-chewed, Into Your Mouth Is Only Because They Have Found No Profitable Way To Do So.

Without Prosperous Local Economies, The People Have No Power And The Land No Voice.

The Question Before Me, Now That I Am Old, Is Not How To Be Dead, Which I Know From Enough Practice, But How To Be Alive, As These Worn Hills Still Tell, And Some Paintings Of Paul Cezanne, And This Mere Singing Wren, Who Thinks He's Alive Forever, This Instant, And May Be.

We Are Destroying Our Country - I Mean Our Country Itself, Our Land. This Is A Terrible Thing To Know, But It Is Not A Reason For Despair Unless We Decide To Continue The Destruction. If We Decide To Continue The Destruction, That Will Not Be Because We Have No Other Choice. This Destruction Is Not Necessary. It Is Not Inevitable, Except That By Our Submissiveness We Make It So.

Laugh. Laughter Is Immeasurable. Be Joyful Though You Have Considered All The Facts.

And If We Ask What Are The Cultural Resources That Can Inform And Sustain A Proper Creaturely And Stewardly Awareness Of The Lives In A Farmer's Keeping, I Believe That We Will Find Them Gathered Under The Heading Of Husbandry.

Sabbath Observance Invites Us To Stop. It Invites Us To Rest. It Asks Us To Notice That While We Rest, The World Continues Without Our Help. It Invites Us To Delight In The World's Beauty And Abundance.

Invest In The Millennium. Plant Sequoias. Say That Your Main Crop Is The Forest That You Did Not Plant, That You Will Not Live To Harvest.

There Are Some Things The Arrogant Mind Does Not See; It Is Blinded By Its Vision Of What It Desires.

Finally From The Crease Of The Ravine I Am Following, There Begins To Come The Trickling And Splashing Of Water. There Is A Great Restfulness In The Sounds These Small Streams Make; They Are Going Down As Fast As They Can, But Their Sound Seem Leisurely And Idle, As If Produced Like Gemstones With The Greatest Patience And Care.

We Have Lived Our Lives By The Assumption That What Was Good For Us Would Be Good For The World. We Have Been Wrong. We Must Change Our Lives So That It Will Be Possible To Live By The Contrary Assumption, That What Is Good For The World Will Be Good For Us. And That Requires That We Make The Effort To Know The World And Learn What Is Good For It.

It Is Only By Understanding The Cultural Complexity And Largeness Of The Concept Of Agriculture That We Can See The Threatening Diminishments Implied By The Term 'agribusiness.'

What Leads To Peace Is Not Violence But Peaceableness, Which Is Not Passivity, But An Alert, Informed, Practiced, And Active State Of Being.

I Hear From Readers A Good Deal, And I Try To Answer Every Letter. I Think, Because Of My Commitment To Issues Of Conservation And Good Agriculture And Peaceableness, They Find Something Hopeful In My Work.

The Real Work Of Planet-saving Will Be Small, Humble, And Humbling, And (insofar As It Involves Love) Pleasing And Rewarding. Its Jobs Will Be Too Many To Count, Too Many To Report, Too Many To Be Publicly Noticed Or Rewarded, Too Small To Make Anyone Rich Or Famous.

You Don't Need To Be Told Some Things. You Can Sometimes Tell More By A Man's Silence And The Set Of His Head Than By What He Says.

What I Stand For Is What I Stand On.

I Go Among Trees And Sit Still. All My Stirring Becomes Quiet Around Me Like Circles On Water.

I Would Consider Myself Simply A Critic Of The Market Economy. My Standard Isn't Primarily Political. First Of All, It's Ecological. And Then I Get To Matters That Are Social And Cultural.

Why I Am Not Going To Buy A Computer

The Ability To Speak Exactly Is Intimately Related To The Ability To Know Exactly.

The Mercy Of The World Is Time. Time Does Not Stop For Love, But It Does Not Stop For Death And Grief, Either.

Akin To The Idea That Time Is Money Is The Concept, Less Spoken But As Commonly Assumed, That We May Be Adequately Represented By Money. The Giving Of Money Has Thus Become Our Characteristic Virtue. But To Give Is Not To Do. The Money Is Given In Lieu Of Action, Thought, Care, Time.

Sometimes I Knew In All My Mind And Heart Why I Had Done What I Had Done, And I Welcomed The Sacrifice. But There Were Times Too When I Lived In A Desert And Felt No Joy And Saw No Hope And Could Not Remember My Old Feelings. Then I Lived By Faith Alone, Faith Without Hope. What Good Did I Get From It? I Got To Have Love In My Heart.

There’s Nothing Under The Ground That’s Worth More Than The Little Layer Of Topsoil Sitting On Top Of It.

A Teacher's Major Contribution May Pop Out Anonymuosly In The Life Of Some Ex-student's Grandchild.

The Life We Want Is Not Merely The One We Have Chosen And Made. It Is The One We Must Be Choosing And Making

The More Local And Settled A Culture, The Better It Stays Put, The Less The Damage. It Is The Foreigner Whose Road Of Excess Leads To A Desert... A Man With A Machine And Inadequate Culture... Is A Pestilence. He Shakes More Than He Can Hold.

Love Changes, And In Change Is True.

Our Children No Longer Learn How To Read The Great Book Of Nature From Their Own Direct Experience, Or How To Interact Creatively With The Seasonal Transformations Of The Planet. They Seldom Learn Where Their Water Come From Or Where It Goes. We No Longer Coordinate Our Human Celebration With The Great Liturgy Of The Heavens.

You've Got To Reach Towards A Better Language, And You're Not Going To Make It Up From Scratch; You've Got To Reach Back Into The Tradition. Western Tradition Is Not As Impoverished As A Lot Of People Would Like To Think, But You'd Have To Go Back Before The Industrial Revolution; You May Have To Go Back Farther Than That. Of Course, The Bible Has A Perfectly Adequate Language, But It's Suffered A Lot Of Thoughtless Wear.

Hunger Is A Powerful Persuader If It Happens, And It's Conceivable That It Could Happen. Country People Have Always Known This.

The Aim Of Industrialization Has Always Been To Replace People With Machines Or Other Technology, To Make The Cost Of Production As Low As Possible, To Sell The Product As High As Possible, And To Move The Wealth Into Fewer And Fewer Hands.

The Hierarchy Of Power Is Not The Same As The Hierarchy Of Value. A Good Human Is Higher Than The Animals On Both Scales; An Evil Human Is High On The Scale Of Power, But At The Very Bottom Of The Scale Of Values.

Young Lovers See A Vision Of The World Redeemed By Love. That Is The Truest Thing They Ever See, For Without It Life Is Death.

Perhaps It Is To Prepare To Hear Some Day The Music Of The Spheres That I Am Always Turning My Ears To The Music Of Streams. There Is Indeed A Music In Streams, But It Is Not For The Hurried. It Has To Be Loitered By And Imagined. Or Imagined Toward, For It Is Hardly For Men At All. Nature Has A Patient Ear. To Her The Slowest Funeral March Sounds Like A Jig. She Is Satisfied To Have The Notes Drawn Out To The Lengths Of Days Or Weeks Or Months. Small Variations Are Acceptable To Her, Modulations As Leisurely As The Opening Of A Flower.

I’ve Been Thinking About That Question About What City People Can Do. The Main Thing Is To Realize That Country People Can’t Invent A Better Agriculture By Ourselves. Industrial Agriculture Wasn’t Invented By Us, And We Can’t Uninvent It. We’ll Need Some Help With That.

We Seem To Know That International Wars Tend Not To Stop With Their Formal "peace Treaties." We Seem Not To Have Thought Enough About The Difference Between The Large Official Events Of Political And Military History And Their Overflow Both Into Recognized Effects And Into The Lives Of Unofficial People Who Suffer Them.

And The World Cannot Be Discovered By A Journey Of Miles, No Matter How Long, But Only By A Spiritual Journey, A Journey Of One Inch, Very Arduous And Humbling And Joyful, By Which We Arrive At The Ground At Our Own Feet, And Learn To Be At Home.

When There Are Enough People On The Land To Use It But Not Enough To Husband It, Then The Wildness Of The Soil That We Call Fertility Begins To Diminish, And The Soil Itself Begins To Flee From Us In Water And Wind.

...i Was A Young Man. I Hardly Knew What I Knew, Let Alone What I Was Going To Know.

So It Is That The Life Force May Take Possession Of A Man-- So That In The End He May Be Possessed By Something Greater, No Longer At All Belonging To Himself.

Specialization Is The Great Evil Of Civilization.

This Is A Book About Heaven. I Know It Now. It Floats Among Us Like A Cloud And Is The Realest Thing We Know And The Least To Be Captured, The Least To Be Possessed By Anybody For Himself. It Is Like A Grain Of Mustard Seed, Which You Cannot See Among The Crumbs Of Earth Where It Lies. It Is Like The Reflection Of The Trees On The Water.

Categorical Condemnation Is The Hatred Of The Mob. It Makes Cowards Brave. And There Is Nothing More Fearful Than A Religious Mob, A Mob Overflowing With Righteousness – As At The Crucifixion And Before And Since. This Can Happen Only After We Have Made A Categorical Refusal To Kindness: To Heretics, Foreigners, Enemies Or Any Other Group Different From Ourselves.

The Christian Gospel Is A Summons To Peace, Calling For Justice Beyond Anger, Mercy Beyond Justice, Forgiveness Beyond Mercy, Love Beyond Forgiveness.

If Conservationists Will Attempt To Resume Responsibility For Their Need To Eat, They Will Be Led Back Fairly Directly To All Their Previous Concerns For The Welfare Of Nature.

Charity Even For One Person Does Not Make Sense Except In Terms Of An Effort To Love All Creation In Response To The Creator's Love For It.

There Are Two Laws That We Had Better Take To Be Absolute. The First Is That As We Cannot Exempt Ourselves From Living In This World, Then If We Wish To Live, We Cannot Exempt Ourselves From Using The World. If We Cannot Exempt Ourselves From Use, Then We Must Deal With The Issues Raised By Use. And So The Second Law Is That If We Want To Continue Living, We Cannot Exempt Use From Care.

The Connections Between People And Land Are Dangerously Oversimplified And Mainly Technological.

Better Than Any Argument Is To Rise At Dawn And Pick Dew-wet Red Berries In A Cup.

To Cherish What Remains Of The Earth And To Foster Its Renewal Is Our Only Legitimate Hope Of Survival.

It Is To Be Broken. It Is To Be Torn Open. It Is Not To Be Reached And Come To Rest In Ever. I Turn Against You, I Break From You, I Turn To You. We Hurt, And Are Hurt, And Have Each Other For Healing. It Is Healing. It Is Never Whole.

Let Us Have The Candor To Acknowledge That What We Call "the Economy" Or "the Free Market" Is Less And Less Distinguishable From Warfare.

We Clasp The Hands Of Those Who Go Before Us, And The Hands Of Those Who Come After Us; We Enter The Little Circle Of Each Other's Arms, And The Larger Circle Of Lovers Whose Hands Are Joined In A Dance, And The Larger Circle Of All Creatures, Passing In And Out Of Life, Who Move Also In A Dance, To A Music So Subtle And Vast That No Ear Hears It Except In Fragments.

We Don't Have A Right To Ask Whether We're Going To Succeed Or Not. The Only Question We Have A Right To Ask Is What's The Right Thing To Do? What Does This Earth Require Of Us If We Want To Continue To Live On It?

I Took Her Into Bed With Me And Propped Myself Up With Pillows Against The Headboard To Let Her Nurse. As She Nursed And The Milk Came, She Began A Little Low Contented Sort Of Singing. I Would Feel Milk And Love Flowing From Me To Her As Once It Had Flowed To Me. It Emptied Me. As The Baby Fed, I Seemed Slowly To Grow Empty Of Myself, As If In The Presence Of That Long Flow Of Love Even Grief Could Not Stand.

What Could Be More Superstitious Than The Idea That Money Brings Forth Food?

We Live The Given Life, And Not The Planned.

I See That The Life Of This Place Is Always Emerging Beyond Expectation Or Prediction Or Typicality, That It Is Unique, Given To The World Minute By Minute, Only Once, Never To Be Repeated. And This Is When I See That This Life Is A Miracle, Absolutely Worth Having, Absolutely Worth Saving. We Are Alive Within Mystery, By Miracle.

One Of The Strongest Of Contemporary Conventions Is That Of Comparing To Thoreau Every Writer Who Has Been As Far Out Of The House As The Mailbox.

The Rule, Acknowledged Or Not, Seems To Be That If We Have Great Power We Must Use It. We Would Use A Steam Shovel To Pick Up A Dime. We Have Experts Who Can Prove There Is No Other Way To Do It.

A Man's Life Is Always Dealing With Permanence, That Is The Most Dangerous Kind Of Irresponsibility Is To Think Of Your Doings As Temporary.

The Name Of Our Proper Connection To The Earth Is 'good Work,' For Good Work Involves Much Giving Of Honor. It Honors The Source Of Its Materials; It Honors The Place Where It Is Done; It Honors The Art By Which It Is Done; It Honors The Thing That It Makes And The User Of The Made Thing.

Today, Local Economies Are Being Destroyed By The 'pluralistic,' Displaced, Global Economy, Which Has No Respect For What Works In A Locality. The Global Economy Is Built On The Principle That One Place Can Be Exploited, Even Destroyed, For The Sake Of Another Place.

I Began To Know My Story Then. Like Everybody's, It Was Going To Be The Story Of Living In The Absence Of The Dead. What Is The Thread That Holds It All Together? Grief, I Thought For A While. And Grief Is There Sure Enough, Just About All The Way Through. From The Time I Was A Girl I Have Never Been Far From It. But Grief Is Not A Force And Has No Power To Hold. You Only Bear It. Love Is What Carries You, For It Is Always There, Even In The Dark, Or Most In The Dark, But Shining Out At Times Like Gold Stitches In A Piece Of Embroidery.

This Curious Faith Is Predicated On The Notion That We Will Soon Develop Unlimited New Sources Of Energy: Domestic Oil Fields, Shale Oil, Gasified Coal, Nuclear Power, Solar Energy, And So On. This Is Fantastical Because The Basic Cause Of The Energy Crisis Is Not Scarcity: It Is Moral Ignorance And Weakness Of Character. We Don't Know How To Use Energy Or What To Use It For. And We Cannot Restrain Ourselves. Our Time Is Characterized As Much By The Abuse And Waste Of Human Energy As It Is By The Abuse And Waste Of Fossil Fuel Energy.

We Walked Always In Beauty, It Seemed To Me. We Walked And Looked About, Or Stood And Looked. Sometimes, Less Often, We Would Sit Down. We Did Not Often Speak. The Place Spoke For Us And Was A Kind Of Speech. We Spoke To Each Other In The Things We Saw.

It's The Impeded Stream That Sings

For Complex Reasons, Our Culture Allows "economy" To Mean Only "money Economy." It Equates Success And Even Goodness With Monetary Profit Because It Lacks Any Other Standard Of Measurement. I Am No Economist, But I Venture To Suggest That One Of The Laws Of Such An Economy Is That A Farmer Is Worth More Dead Than Alive. A Second Law Is That Anything Diseased Is More Profitable Than Anything That Is Healthy. What Is Wrong With Us Contributes More To The "gross National Product" Than What Is Right With Us.

Those Who Say Islam Is A Warlike Religion Must Ask If Christianity Has Been As Well.

We Can Grow Good Wheat And Make Good Bread Only If We Understand That We Do Not Live By Bread Alone.

The Cloud Is Free Only To Go With The Wind. The Rain Is Free Only In Falling.

To Be Well Used, Creatures And Places Must Be Used Sympathetically, Just As They Must Be Known Sympathetically To Be Well Known...the "animal Scientist" To Whom It Is Of No Concern Whether Or Not Animals Suffer Will Almost Inevitably Aid And Abet The Destruction Of The Decent Old Ideal Of Animal Husbandry And, As A Consequence, Increase The Suffering Of Animals. I Hope That My Country May Be Delivered From The Remote, Cold Abstractions Of University Science.

We Cannot Hope To Be Secure When Our Government Has Declared, By Its Readiness To Act Alone, Its Willingness To Be Everybody's Enemy.

An Art That Heals And Protects Its Subject Is A Geography Of Scars.

The Soil Under The Grass Is Dreaming Of A Young Forest, And Under The Pavement The Soil Is Dreaming Of Grass.

It Would Not Do For The Consumer To Know That The Hamburger She Is Eating Came From A Steer Who Spent Much Of His Life Standing Deep In His Own Excrement In A Feedlot, Helping To Pollute The Local Streams. Or That The Calf That Yielded The Veal Cutlet On Her Plate Spent Its Life In A Box In Which It Did Not Have Room To Turn Around.

A Person Who Undertakes To Grow A Garden At Home, By Practices That Will Preserve Rather Than Exploit The Economy Of The Soil, Has His Mind Precisely Against What Is Wrong With Us.

The Grower Of Trees, The Gardener, The Man Born To Farming, Whose Hands Reach Into The Ground And Sprout, To Him The Soil Is A Divine Drug. He Enters Into Death Yearly, And Comes Back Rejoicing. He Has Seen The Light Lie Down In The Dung Heap, And Rise Again In The Corn.

New Grief, When It Came, You Could Feel Filling The Air. It Took Up All The Room There Was. The Place Itself, The Whole Place, Became A Reminder Of The Absence Of The Hurt Or The Dead Or The Missing One. I Don't Believe That Grief Passes Away. It Has Its Time And Place Forever. More Time Is Added To It; It Becomes A Story Within A Story. But Grief And Griever Alike Endure.

I Dislike The Thought That Some Animal Has Been Made Miserable To Feed Me. If I Am Going To Eat Meat, I Want It To Be From An Animal That Has Lived A Pleasant, Uncrowded Life Outdoors, On Bountiful Pasture, With Good Water Nearby And Trees For Shade.

Again I Resume The Long Lesson: How Small A Thing Can Be Pleasing, How Little In This Hard World It Takes To Satisfy The Mind And Bring It To Its Rest.

I Am Not Bound For Any Public Place, But For Ground Of My Own Where I Have Planted Vines And Orchard Trees, And In The Heat Of The Day Climbed Up Into The Healing Shadow Of The Woods.

I'd Rather Rely On Mother Nature's Wisdom Than Man's Cleverness

Sit And Be Still Until In The Time Of No Rain You Hear Beneath The Dry Wind's Commotion In The Trees The Sound Of Flowing Water Among The Rocks, A Stream Unheard Before, And You Are Where Breathing Is Prayer.

The River And The Garden Have Been The Foundations Of My Economy Here. Of The Two I Have Liked The River Best. It Is Wonderful To Have The Duty Of Being On The River The First And Last Thing Every Day. I Have Loved It Even In The Rain. Sometimes I Have Loved It Most In The Rain.

To Husband Is To Use With Care, To Keep, To Save, To Make Last, To Conserve. Old Usage Tells Us That There Is A Husbandry Also Of The Land, Of The Soil, Of The Domestic Plants And Animals. And So It Appears That Most And Perhaps All Of Industrial Agriculture's Manifest Failures Are The Result Of An Attempt To Make The Land Produce Without Husbandry.

To Have Good Farming Or Good Land Use Of Any Kind, You Have Got To Have Limits. Capitalism Doesn't Acknowledge Limits.

Thinking Is The Most Overrated Human Activity.

Long Live Gravity! Long Live Stupidity, Error, And Greed In The Palaces Of Fantasy Capitalism!

We Will Instead Have To Measure Our Economy By The Health Of The Ecosystems And Human Communities Where We Do Our Work.

In Order To Survive, A Plurality Of True Communities Would Require Not Egalitarianism And Tolerance But Knowledge, An Understanding Of The Necessity Of Local Differences, And Respect. Respect, I Think, Always Implies Imagination - The Ability To See One Another, Across Our Inevitable Differences, As Living Souls.

We Do Not Need To Plan Or Devise A "world Of The Future"; If We Take Care Of The World Of The Present, The Future Will Have Received Full Justice From Us. A Good Future Is Implicit In The Soils, Forests, Grasslands, Marshes, Deserts, Mountains, Rivers, Lakes, And Oceans That We Have Now, And In The Good Things Of Human Culture That We Have Now; The Only Valid "futurology" Available To Us Is To Take Care Of Those Things. We Have No Need To Contrive And Dabble At "the Future Of The Human Race"; We Have The Same Pressing Need That We Have Always Had - To Love, Care For, And Teach Our Children.

After A While, Though The Grief Did Not Go Away From Us, It Grew Quiet. What Had Seemed A Storm Wailing Through The Entire Darkness Seemed To Come In At Last And Lie Down.

I Don't Think I Had Even Begun To Have An Idea Where I Was Going, But Wherever It Was, That Was Where I Wanted To Go.

The Language That Reveals Also Obscures.

When The Mind's An Empty Room The Clear Days Come.

To Be Interested In Food But Not In Food Production Is Clearly Absurd.

Food Production

We Are Alive Within Mystery, By Miracle... We Have More Than We Can Know. We Know More Than We Can Say.

We Are Going To Have To Gather Up The Fragments Of Knowledge And Responsibilities That Have Been Turned Over To Governments, Corporations, And Specialists, And Put Those Fragments Back Together Again In Our Own Minds And In Our Families And Household And Neighborhoods.

These Are People Who Are Capable Of Devotion, Public Devotion, To Justice. They Meant What They Said And Every Day That Passes, They Mean It More.

As I Have Read The Gospels Over The Years, The Belief Has Grown In Me That Christ Did Not Come To Found An Organized Religion But Came Instead To Found An Unorganized One. He Seems To Have Come To Carry Religion Out Of The Temples Into The Fields And Sheep Pastures, Onto The Roadsides And The Banks Of The Rivers, Into The Houses Of Sinners And Publicans, Into The Town And The Wilderness, Toward The Membership Of All That Is Here. Well, You Can Read And See What You Think.

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Ludwig Von Mises

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